ORGANIZE THE WORLD! 



BY EDWIN D. MEAD. 


n 



Price, 10 cents. 

LEND-A-hAND OFFICE, i Beacon Street, Boston, and 
A/TERICAN PEACE SOCIETY, 31 Beacon Street, Boston, 




Organize the World! 

BY EDWIN D. MEAD. 



We have come to a time in human history when there is 
imperative call for a vision and courage in the field of interna¬ 
tional affairs as great as the vision and courage of Washington 
for America a hundred years ago. When the War of the Revo¬ 
lution was over and the independence of the United States was 
secure, the mind of Washington turned immediately to the 
great West. Before the Revolution, indeed, his mind had 
turned to the West and the question of its development and its 
relation to the East more seriously than that of any other man 
in America. At the time of the outbreak of the war no other 
man in America controlled so much land west of the Ohio as 
he. The moment that the war was ended, even before the 
terms of peace with England had been definitely arranged, his 
interest came back to this commanding subject of the West. 
He knew now, as he had known when, years before the Revo¬ 
lution, he had written of channels for “the trade of a rising 
Empire,” that the great question for America was the opening 
of the West and the binding of East and West together; and 
he knew that it was a far greater question now than then. He 
left his camp at Newburg on the Hudson, and made on horse¬ 
back an exploring expedition of three weeks through the State 
of New York. He proceeded up the Mohawk to Fort Schuy¬ 
ler, surveyed the water communication with Ontario, and then 
traversed, the country to the eastern branch of the Susque¬ 
hanna, considering the subject of the best lines of communica¬ 
tion with the West. “ Prompted by these actual observations,” 
he wrote to the Marquis of Chastellux, “ I could not help tak¬ 
ing a more contemplative and extensive view of the vast inland 
navigation of these United States, and could not but be struck 
with the immense diffusion and importance of it and with the 
goodness of that Providence which has dealt his favors to us 
with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wisdom 
enough to improve them ! I shall not rest contented until I 

Reprinted from the “ Editor’s Table ” of the New England Magazine for December, 
1898. This leaflet may be procured for $1.50 per hundred copies, or #10 per thousand, from 
the Peace Crusade Committee, 14 Bedford Street, Boston. 


have explored the western country and traversed those lines, 
or a great part of them, which have given bounds of a new 
Empire.” “The honor, power, and true interests of this coun¬ 
try,” he wrote at the same time to Lafayette, impatient with 
the petty jealousies and ambitions of the states, “must be 
measured on a continental scale.” 

A year later came the more important ride up the Potomac 
and over the Alleghanies, in pursuance of the same great 
interest. This had been the dominant interest of his mind in 
his retirement at Mount Vernon, following the resignation of 
his commission, and the theme of earnest correspondence with 
Jefferson. He was absent from home more than a month on 
this new western tour, riding nearly seven hundred miles, 
through a country where the Indians were still dangerous, the 
country known to him so well in his youthful days. As he lay 
down to sleep at night by his camp-fire in the woods, under the 
silent stars which, looking down on him, also looked down on 
the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Mississippi, he thought of 
the thirteen disordered states waiting to become a nation, and 
of the great West waiting to be born. There still exists a map 
of the country between the Potomac and the Ohio waters, as 
sketched by Washington himself while on this expedition in 
1784; and his journal minutely records his conversations with 
every intelligent person whom he met, respecting the facilities 
for internal navigation afforded by the rivers. The routes to 
the Ohio which Washington selected at that time as the best 
routes are to-day substantially the lines of the great railroads 
from Washington and Baltimore to Pittsburg, Parkersburg, and 
Wheeling. 

The first-fruit of this expedition was the famous letter to 
Benjamin Harrison, then Governor of Virginia, upon the whole 
question of communication between the East and the West, 
which was one of the most remarkable letters that Washington 
ever wrote, and which proves him the most far-sighted and 
sagacious man in America at that time so far as concerns 
American expansion and development. The next fruit was 
the Potomac Company, of which Washington was the presi¬ 
dent, for the opening up of a route to the West by way of the 
Potomac. Washington’s interest in this important enterprise 

— an enterprise whose benefit, as he wrote to Jefferson just 
before his inauguration, “would not be confined to narrower 
limits than the whole western territory of the United States ” 

— was his most engrossing interest during the whole period 
between the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention. 
Indeed, it was at a little meeting of the Virginia and Maryland 


commissioners at Mount Vernon — for the Potomac Company 
was chartered by the concurrent acts of Virginia and Mary¬ 
land— to concert commercial regulations for those two states 
that the suggestion was first made, probably by Washington 
himself, of a national convention, to concert uniform commer¬ 
cial regulations for the whole country, which convention, 
meeting at Annapolis in 1786, gave birth to the great conven¬ 
tion at Philadelphia the next year, which gave us our present 
Constitution. 

Washington’s work as president of the Potomac Company 
was largely that of overcoming jealousies and making men 
look at things in a large way instead of a small way. Virgini¬ 
ans were jealous among themselves, lest one part of the state 
should obtain an advantage over another. He showed them 
that the benefits of trade were diffusive and beneficial to all. 
He showed that his own interest in the Potomac scheme did 
not interfere with his patriotic interest in every similar scheme. 
He praised the enterprise of New York and Pennsylvania. 

“ The more communications we open to the western country,” 
he said to a citizen of Maryland, “the closer we bind that 
rising world— for indeed it maybe so called—To our inter¬ 
ests, the greater strength we shall acquire.” “I wish,” he 
said to a member of Congress, “ that every door of that coun¬ 
try may be set wide open, and commercial intercourse ren¬ 
dered as free and easy as possible. That is the best, if not the 
only, cement that can bind these people to us.” 

Washington was the great promoter of the settlement of the 
West by the best men, the most influential friend of Rufus 
Putnam and the New England men who went to Ohio. It was 
he who first pointed out the Ohio valley to the pioneers as 
a favorable location, and he who was the chief mediator 
between them and Congress. He knew many of the founders 
of Ohio personally. “No colony in America,” he wrote, “was 
ever settled under such favorable auspices. There never were 
men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a com¬ 
munity.” Were he a young man, he declared, he knew of no 
country where he would himself rather go than to the Ohio 
country. He was interested in the success of General Putnam 
and those who followed him to Marietta, because they were 
men of character and their settlement was of the sort he 
wished to see in the West. He did not wish, he said, to see 
the great West overrun with “land jobbers, speculators, ^an^d 
monopolizers, or even scattered settlers,” —■ “ a parcel of ban-/ 
ditti,” he called them, “ who will bid defiance to all authority, / 
while they are skimming and disposing of the cream of the 


4 


country.” “Compact and progressive settlement” was what 
would give strength to the Union. 

The more we study Washington’s relations to the great West, 
the extent of his services in opening it up, his anxious interest 
to bind it closely to the East, his endeavors to have it settled 
and controlled by men of character, his perception of the com¬ 
manding place it was soon to hold in the country, his prophetic 
words, more than realized to-day, concerning its great future, 
the more deeply we feel that, of all the far-seeing men of that 
critical and heroic period, he was the most far-seeing, the man 
of most sagacity and shrewdness, the most practical man, the 
man of most vision, the man of most constructive power. And 
this is what we feel as we study his work as president of the 
Constitutional Convention and as president of the United 
States. Here at last was an American, a man who calculated 
his politics and measured the true interests of this country on 
a continental scale. Men had said America before. It was 
sturdy Christopher Gadsden, of South Carolina—a voice by 
strange irony from precisely that state which was destined to 
deal the worst blows to the nation — who in the Stamp Act 
Congress at New York in 1765 spoke that memorable word: 
“There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, 
known on the continent, but all of us Americans.” America 
to Christopher Gadsden was a little strip along the Atlantic 
coast. America to George Washington, riding over the Alle- 
ghanies into the West, was a continent. He lived in the fut¬ 
ure. No Virginia could bound his vision nor accommodate his 
patriotism nor his organizing power. He needed a larger unit. 
Madison and Jefferson might write Virginia and Kentucky res¬ 
olutions. “Think of your national Union,” was Washington’s 
farewell word and the great legacy of his life, “ as of the pal¬ 
ladium of your safety and prosperity.” His vision and his 
virtue, more than conventions or than laws, made America a 
nation; and that contagious vision, measuring our power and 
our true interests more and more upon a continental scale, 
pushed the nation on and on to broader horizons, to larger 
tasks, and to a more perfect union. The French philosophers 
of the last century declared that there could never be a large 
republic, because that close relation, common feeling and com¬ 
mon public spirit necessary to a strong and vital republican 
life were not possible over large areas. But large and small 
are purely relative terms; and the inventions and incalculable 
changes of the century have brought it about that for all politi¬ 
cal purposes our American republic is vastly smaller than the 
republic organized by the convention of 1787, Boston and San 


5 


Francisco far closer together than Washington’s Philadelphia 
and Mount Vernon. Each period of expansion and of progress 
has found us more neighborly, more intimate, and more organic, 
a better family, thari the period before ; the larger, the closer; 
the farther circumference, the more dynamic centre; the 
broader life, the more perfect union and more general welfare. 
The English historian, Freeman, has written of Washington as 
“the expander of England,”—because it was he who taught 
England in a way she did not forget the necessity of that 
attitude toward her colonies which has made her subsequent 
expansion and her great empire possible. He was the true 
expander of America, because he first and most influentially 
conceived our empire on a continental scale, because he had the 
insight into the federal principle and the genius for organiza¬ 
tion which commanded the republic into being and made the 
conditions of its great progress possible and sure. 

To-day, a century after Washington, we are called to a 
vision as inspiring and imperative as that which came to him 
as he rode up the Mohawk, and to a greater organizing work 
than that which he performed with such wisdom, courage, 
patience and success. He was commanded to organize a 
nation: we are commanded to organize the world. He saw 
that the time had come when our power and our true interests 
must be measured on a continental scale: we are warned that 
the time has come when we must conceive of our power and 
our true interests by the measure of mankind. Let no man 
think of himself any longer in the first place as a New England 
man, as a New Yorker, as a Virginian, but all of us Ameri¬ 
cans,—that was the vision and message of Washington; and 
that insight and that law, coming to petty, prejudiced, jealous, 
and disordered states, put an end to chaos and brought peace, 
prosperity, strength, largeness of life, and an ever-broadening 
horizon. Let no man think of himself any longer in the first 
place as an American, as an Englishman, a Spaniard, a French¬ 
man, a German, a Russian, but all men in the first place citi¬ 
zens of the world,— that is the message which has been thun¬ 
dered in the ears of Washington’s America in this eventful 
and surprising year as it was never done before. It took a 
civil war to teach Gadsden’s Carolina and Washington’s Vir¬ 
ginia that the interests of the nation are above those of the 
state, and that a state can only then be true to itself and its 
duty when it remembers that there is a lower and a higher, 
and knows well what that lower and that higher are. Virginia 
and Massachusetts have no less genuine and worthy pride as 
states, they do not put to smaller or less vital use their sacred 


6 


history and heritage, their great sons are no less their sons, 
when they bow their heads to baptism in the vision of Wash¬ 
ington and Webster of a nation which must measure its powers 
and duties on a continental scale, and know that national life 
into which they are incorporated as the nobler and more com¬ 
manding life, determining the other. . The nation is organized. 
Its logic was shaped finally in the fiery forge of war. 

The nation is the largest thing we have yet got organized. 
We must organize the world. Unending jealousies, commer¬ 
cial clash, friction of law r , paralysis of industry, financial disor¬ 
der, the misdirection and miscarriage of good energy, mis¬ 
chievous ignorance and prejudice, incalculable waste, chronic 
alarm and devastating wars are before us until we do it. That 
is the lesson of the hour. The relations and interdependence 
of the nations of Christendom have become, by the amazing 
advance of civilization in the century, closer, complexer, and 
more imperious far than the relations of Massachusetts, Penn¬ 
sylvania and Georgia, when Washington from the heights of 
the Alleghanies looked into the West and thought of the con¬ 
tinent. Yet France and Germany, England and Russia, Amer¬ 
ica and Spain, in their great burrs of guns, jealous of each 
other, distrustful, envious, afraid, go on in their separate, in- 
co-operant, abortive ways, keeping God’s earth in chaos, when 
a great wisdom and great virtue like Washington’s a hundred 
years ago would convert them into a family of nations, into a 
federation and fraternity, with a comprehensive law, an efficient 
police, and a purposeful economy. 

The trouble with us is that we have not organized our¬ 
selves. Our institutions are not up to our best feeling and best 
thought. The new wine of our larger and better humanity 
finds no new bottles, and the old ones are bursting. The na¬ 
tions are in the condition of men before the days of courts, 
who had to settle their differences by their fists and by seeing 
who was strongest. If we quarrel with England about Vene¬ 
zuela or with Spain about Cuba, there is no court to which we 
can go. Nations improvise boards of arbitration for particular 
emergencies; it is the glory of America that no other nation 
has been so forward in this as she has been. But particular 
emergencies are precisely the occasions when there is need of 
general principles and regular procedure. As the Supreme 
Court of the republic settles differences between individuals 
and states, and between states and states, so when we pass 
beyond our present crude condition, when we organize the 
world, will the regular and permanent world tribunals adju-t 
our international disputes and, upon proper complaint and 


7 


proper evidence, put an end to nuisances and wrongs, such as 
Europe did not stop in Armenia, and such as we did stop in 
Cuba. 

If the Spanish war and the problems springing out of it 
have made the people of America realize that they live in a 
very different time and different circumstances from those in 
which the Monroe doctrine was born, we are glad of it. Their 
readiness to plunge into the politics of the Philippines without 
any reference to the Monroe doctrine, although not very cred¬ 
itable to a people who, under the shelter of that doctrine, made 
such an outcry three years ago against the English epiphany 
in Venezuela, shows how superficial and fictitious the ground 
of that outcry was, and how effectually we are now transcend¬ 
ing that view of the world which, for political purposes, sees 
it primarily as two hemispheres instead of as one great whole. 
The world of 1898 is not the world of 1823. The one cardi¬ 
nal part of the Monroe doctrine, that this republic will not per¬ 
mit the lodgment on this continent of any institutions or in¬ 
fluence hostile to free government, we trust the republic will 
always be true to; and we believe it will. Therein lie the 
glory and the mighty power of the Monroe doctrine. The 
faster the rest of it is now sloughed off, the better for America 
and for mankind. And we are glad that the attitude of our 
government and people this year toward the Philippines, what¬ 
ever the final outcome there, has forever placed us out of court, 
should we venture the poor plea again that a European power 
or people may not have anything new to say or do upon this 
continent simply because it is European. That parochialism 
at least is over, and perhaps the result is worth all it has cost. 
America’s international issues are no longer to be settled by 
geography, but each on its own merits, by justice and by right. 

It is right and justice, honor and wisdom, common sense, 
not the atlas, which to-day forbid the forcible annexation of the 
Philippines to the United States. It is not that this republic 
is not as competent as any nation upon earth to govern and 
educate people behind us in their political development,— to 
lift up men who are lower down than we. That, as we de¬ 
clared six months ago, were a pusillanimous thing to say. 
That were a shameful impeachment of America. That were 
to accuse democracy with an accusation which, if it could be 
sustained, were fatal. The question is not one of competence 
to dominate and rule: it is the greater question of political 
morality and fidelity to the democratic idea and democratic 
method in the world. Let the republic insist that the Philip¬ 
pines shall be independent, freed from a sovereignty which 


8 


had no credentials but conquest and force, none which pass 
muster in the court of heaven. Let her view her present duty 
as simply and solemnly that of paving the way to self-govern¬ 
ment in the islands. Let her, best of all, call upon the en¬ 
lightened nations of the world to unite with her in guarantee¬ 
ing this unhappy people order and opportunity; and then, if 
her people be still consumed with zeal, let them pour in mis¬ 
sionaries and schoolmasters, trades and tradesmen, health 
experts and political philosophers, to their hearts’ content. 
But not guns, not soldiers, not new credentials of greed and 
force and conquest, to supplant the old. 

The duty is not alone to the Philippines, not alone to 
America’s own honor nor to that health which is the first con¬ 
dition of good service, but to the w'orld and the future, to that 
high principle of international concert and of consideration in 
the first place for the world’s peace and progress instead of our 
own gain, in whose ascendency alone lie the world’s hope and 
the lasting and true gain of any nation. We entered upon this 
war with solemn disclaimers of the world’s old motives of war, 
with express repudiation of the thought of conquest, of that 
“original sin of nations,” as Gladstone called it, “the lust for 
territorial aggrandizement.” Europe said that our fine pro¬ 
testation was hypocrisy. We could afford the action which to 
the Eur9pean mind will prove it so,— although even a strict 
and formal consistency, novel and startling in this field, would 
have a heroism and salutary virtue in it for which much good 
.might well be given up,— if the protestation w r ere ignored for 
some plain interest of mankind. We cannot afford the action, 
thus to fortify those hoary old aims and methods of conquest 
and expansion, which in the century have sullied England’s 
honor and corrupted England’s life, hindered English liberty 
and multiplied English sin to an extent for which England’s 
undeniable world service, service which other methods would 
have made not less, but greater, furnishes, as the working-out 
must show ever more and more, no adequate makeweight. It 
is no new question which confronts us: we cannot plead that 
we have not full instruction from history. It is the question of 
Gladstone against Disraeli: it is the question whether America 
will praise Gladstone with its lips and do the works of Disraeli 
with its hands. We cannot afford it, thus to strike mankind in 
the face and cloud the dawning new policies of progress, to 
push back again the borders of reason which is pushing back 
so painfully the dominion of force, to militarize this great re¬ 
public, with which it has been our pride to confront army- 
ridden Europe, at the very hour when the gospel of peace 


9 


has reached even the mouth of czars, to multiply the chances 
of confusion and war when the best minds of the nations are 
working for the order and the organization of the world. 

The organization of the world has been the dream and goal 
of prophet minds through the whole modern time. The first 
great modern man — for Dante was that — made that the 
central thought of his politics. He spoke in his Monarchia 
of peace,— there can be no sure progress, no sure conserva¬ 
tion of civilization, he saw well, till peace is sure; he spoke 
of freedom; he spoke of justice; but chiefly he spoke of 
unity. He could conceive it only under the form of univer¬ 
sal empire; we, with six centuries more of experience and 
thought, dream of the federation of the world; but he saw 
clearly what the centuries have made us see more clearly, that 
peace and freedom and justice and progress are assured only 
by unity, the organization of the world. The Bohemian Podie- 
brad, two centuries after Dante, laid his plan “for the emanci¬ 
pation of peoples and kings by the organization of a new Eu¬ 
rope ” ; and, a century further on, Henry of Navarre and Sully 
conceived their “ Great Design ” — of a “ Christian republic ” 
of free nations. The seventeenth century began with Emeric 
la Croix’s Nouveau Cynee , in which he discoursed upon the 
occasion and the means of establishing a general peace and 
freedom of trade for all the world, arguing for a permanent 
international diet to be intrusted with the power of settling 
all international disputes. The century ended with William 
Penn’s “ Plan for the Peace of Europe,” which was a plan for 
a United States of Europe, most remarkable of all early plans 
of federation, and most remarkable prophecy and earnest of 
the United States of the World, which is the ultimate political 
object to-day. The eighteenth century opened with the great 
dream of Saint-Pierre: it closed with Immanuel Kant’s “Eter¬ 
nal Peace.” The time would fail to tell of Leibnitz, of Rous¬ 
seau, of Voltaire, of Goudar, of Mayer, of Fichte, and of 
Franklin, of Saint-Simon and Fourier, of Seeley and Laveleye 
and Edward Everett Hale. 

Eternal peace, said Immanuel Kant, can come only with 
the federation of the world, and the federation of the world 
only with the universal republic, self-government in every 
nation. There can be peace only as there is organization, 
adequate, rational machinery to take the place of war when 
nations fall out with each other. “Lay down your arms!” 
good men are shouting to the nations. Let the shout be, 
“ Organize the world! ” The arms will be laid down, wars 
will cease, only as an adequate rational appeal and authority 


IO 


are provided to take their place. “ The methods by which 
war may be superseded,” was what the will of Charles Sumner 
invited the students of Harvard to consider year by year. 
“I cannot doubt,” he said, and still keeps saying, “that the 
same modes of decision which now prevail between individ¬ 
uals, between towns, and between smaller communities, may 
be extended to nations.” The question of method it is upon 
which men must fix their attention ; and Sumner’s creed 
pointed the way to the true method, to the first step in the 
organization of the world, which, and which alone, can end 
the age of war and bring perpetual peace. 

We dream of the federation of the world; and we will dream 
of it, and work for it. But we shall not soon see a world fed¬ 
eration like this American federation. There can be no 
mechanical federation that will be lasting or that would be 
very useful. We want to study chiefly the chemistry of fed¬ 
eration, not its mechanics. This federal republic demands and 
guarantees that every state within it shall also be a republic. 
No federation of the world, says Kant, save with self-govern¬ 
ment in every nation. That is the order,— democracy, unity. 
The key of the federation is the key of the average; and the 
federation of tyranny with freedom might well be the fatal 
form by which tyranny should tyrannize over freedom, leaven 
and neutralize it, and check its conquest of the world. But 
the federation of the world will come; and in its spirit let us 
live, as age by age we extend its institutional borders. And 
whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule 
and mind the same thing,— that is the law of new attainment 
and of advance into larger and yet larger circles of unity. 

The wars of Christendom would cease to-morrow if the 
nations of Christendom would make rules commensurate with 
their attainments and organize what can be organized in 
fidelity to freedom and every principle of progress. Only 
selfishness, jealousy and false ambition delay longer the 
establishment by the half-dozen great enlightened powers of a 
permanent international tribunal. With such a tribunal, the 
Venezuela agitation of three years ago, the wrongs in Cuba and 
last summer’s wasteful and devastating war would have been 
impossible, while every reform and every right would have been 
easily and instantly secured. With such a tribunal the recent 
strained relations between France and England could not have 
lasted an hour. The fact of a court is in common life the 
chief and usually sufficient pledge of legal and orderly habits; 
and the mere existence of the international tribunal will in the 
better future be the world’s protection from a thousand col- 


lisions and conditions which now provoke the cannon or might 
then demand the judge. 

In the first place, men, not Americans or Englishmen or 
Russians,— let us as such go in the first place into court. 
That may end war, and that is much indeed; but that does 
not make an organic world. The world is to be organized, not 
to keep nations peaceful in orderly arbitrament and protected 
separateness, but for constructive and co-operative life. That 
life will come as nations see that they are not their own, but 
all of them members one of another, with common inheritances, 
with common obligations, and with a common destiny. They 
will not see it alike, and they will not see it simultaneously. 
Some great enlightened, chosen nation — shall it not be this 
federal republic ? — will see it, and the vision will make it a 
centre of union; and to this another nation, by.some command¬ 
ing affinity, will join itself, and another and another will thrill 
responsive to the call, the leavening word spreading and 
spreading. And so the state of nations, the organization of the 
world, will come. It shall be Anglo-Saxondom ; it shall be 
Teutondom ; it shall be Christendom ; it shall be mankind. 

In the Parliament House at Westminster, among the scenes 
from English history painted on the walls, the American is 
most stirred when he comes to the Departure of the Pilgrim 
Fathers to found New England. England — the England 
descended from the England which “ harried them out ”— will 
not let that scene go as a part of American history only, but 
claims it now as one of the proudest scenes in her own history, 
too. So the American will no more view Wyclif and Shakes¬ 
peare and Cromwell and Milton and Gladstone as chiefly 
Englishmen, but as fellow-citizens,— as he views Victor Hugo 
and Kant and Tolstoi and Mazzini. The American is to be 
pitied who does not feel himself native to Stratford and to 
London, as to St. Louis or St. Paul,— native to Leyden and to 
Weimar and Geneva. Each narrower circle only gains in 
richness and in sacredness and power as it expands into the 
larger and the larger; each community and state and nation, 
as it enters into a broader and completer organic life. This is 
the Christmas message to the world. Let there be peace ; let 
there be order; and, that there may be, let us know what 
manner of men we are. “ Peace on earth ! ” that was the first 
Christmas greeting; and the first Christian argument upon the 
hill of Mars, “God hath made of one blood all nations of 
men. 









Kant’s “Eternal Peace.” 


BY EDWIN D. MEAD. 


In 1795, just a century before the sudden excitement in 
America over the Venezuelan imbroglio roused our people 
as never before to a sense of their duty to establish a perma¬ 
nent system of arbitration to take the place of war in the 
settlement of disputes among nations, Immanuel Kant pub¬ 
lished his great tractate on “ Eternal Peace.” It was the 
most remarkable prophecy and program ever made of the 
day 

“ When the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled 
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.” 

The prophecy was not forgotten by some of those who in 
the April days went up to the Arbitration Conference at 
Washington, the most important gathering which the world 
has ever seen of men who were in earnest about having the 
prophecy fulfilled. The name of Immanuel Kant was honored 
there. But few perhaps remembered the word in his immortal 
essay which seems a special prophecy of the part which our 
republic seems destined to take in the promotion of the cause 
in which the great philosopher was the pioneer and in behalf 
of which these men from every quarter of the nation came 
together. “If happy circumstances bring it about,” wrote 
Kant, “that a powerful and enlightened people form them¬ 
selves into a republic,— which by its very nature must be 
disposed in favor of perpetual peace,— this will furnish a 
centre of federative union for other States to attach them¬ 
selves to, and thus to secure the conditions of liberty among 
all States, according to the idea of the right of nations; and 
such a union would extend wider and wider, in the course of 
time, by the addition of further connections of this kind.” 

It was a remarkable insight of Kant’s that universal peace 
could come only with the universal republic. The republican 
constitution, he said, founded on the principle of the liberty 

Reprinted from the Editor’s Table of the New England Magazine , June, i8q6. 
This leaflet may be procured for #1.50 per hundred copies, or #10 per thousand, from the 
Peace Crusade Committee, 14 Bedford Street, Boston. 


2 


and equality of its citizens and the dependence of all on a 
common legislation, is “ the only one which arises out of the 
idea of the original compact upon which all the rightful legis¬ 
lation of a people is founded. As regards public right, the 
republican principles, therefore, lie originally and essentially 
at the basis of the civil constitution in all its forms ; and the 
only question for us now is as to whether it is also the only 
constitution that can lead to a perpetual peace.” Kant declares 
that the republican constitution, having its original source in 
the conception of right, does include the prospect of realizing 
perpetual peace; and the reason of this, he says, may be stated 
as follows: “ According to the republican constitution, the 
consent of the citizens as members of the State is required 
to determine at any time the question whether there shall 
be war or not. Hence nothing is more natural than that 
they should be very loath to enter upon so very undesirable an 
undertaking; for in decreeing it they would necessarily be 
resolving to bring upon themselves all the horrors of war. And 
in their case this implies such consequences as these : to have 
to fight in their own persons; to supply the costs of the war 
out of their own property; to have sorrowfully to repair the 
devastation which it leaves behind; and, as a crowning evil, to 
have to take upon themselves at the end a burden of debt 
which will go on embittering peace itself. On the other hand, 
in a constitution where the subject is not a voting member of 
the State, resolution to go to war is a matter of the smallest 
concern in the world. For in this case the ruler, who as such 
is not a mere citizen, but the owner of the State, need not in 
the least suffer personally by war, nor has he to sacrifice his 
pleasures of the table or of the chase or his palaces. He can 
therefore resolve for war from insignificant reasons, as if it 
were but a hunting expedition ; and he may leave the justifica¬ 
tion of it without concern to the diplomatic body.” 

It is certainly true that the development of the idea of inter¬ 
national arbitration has been coincident with the growth of 
modern democracy. It was no accident which made the 
United States and England the leaders of the nations in the 
preaching and the practice of this principle; and it was no ac¬ 
cident which brought about the conference at Washington, 
looking to a permanent system of arbitration between these 
two greatest republics in the world. It was the logic of Kant’s 
philosophy and of the nature of political things. Such a union 
as it was the object of the Washington conference to bring 
about will extend by the addition first of those other nations 
which have advanced farthest in self-government or have be- 


3 


come republics in the sense in which Kant uses that term. 
The republican constitution of Kant’s thought is not to be 
confounded with the democratic constitution. Self-government 
is often better realized under monarchical than under demo¬ 
cratic forms. “ Republicanism regarded as the constitutive 
principle of a State is the political severance of the executive 
power of the government from the legislative power. Despot¬ 
ism is in principle the irresponsible executive administration 
of the State by laws laid down and enacted by the same power 
that administers them, the ruler exercising his own private 
will as if it were the public will. If the mode of government 
is to conform to the idea of right, it must embody the repre¬ 
sentative system; for in this system alone is a really republi¬ 
can government possible. Without representation,*no govern¬ 
ment can possibly be any other than despotic and arbitrary. 

Great Britain is to-day among the leading nations of the 
world the truest republic, according to Kant’s definition, after 
our own republic, because her people are most truly and com¬ 
pletely self-governed. There was never so conspicuous and 
pitiful an instance of failure to distinguish between names and 
realities as that of Secretary Olney’s characterization of the 
issue between England and Venezuela, in his correspondence 
with the English government made public in December, 1895, 
as a collision between monarchical institutions and the princi¬ 
ple of self-government. England and the United States, one 
hemmed and hampered still by the spectre of a crown and the 
social power of a hereditary aristocracy, the other shackled 
and encumbered worse by a lawless plutocracy and consuming 
mammonism, stand side by side as the great exemplars of repre¬ 
sentative government in the modern world ; and the logic of 
history, we say, and of the profoundest political philosophy 
decrees the establishment between these republics of the first 
permanent system of international arbitration, with the sure 
pledge and prospect that such a union will extend wider and 
wider until it eventuates in the “ universal cosmopolitical in¬ 
stitution ” of Kant’s prophecy. 

It was almost a dozen years before the publication of 
“ Eternal Peace,” in 1784, that Kant used this great prophetic 
term, and confidently foretold the end of wars and the reign of 
international law, in his essay on “The Natural Principle of 
the Political Order, considered in connection with the Idea 
of a Universal Cosmopolitical History.” It is to be remem¬ 
bered that this essay appeared five years before the outbreak 
of the French Revolution, and one year after the Treaty of 
Paris recognized the success of the American Revolution, in 


4 


which Kant had taken so deep an interest. “Eternal Peace” 
was published just after the peace of Basel had recognized the 
French Republic, seeming to inaugurate a new era of peace in 
Europe. The later essay was received with far the greater 
interest at the time, 1,500 copies, we read, being sold in a few 
weeks, and a second edition appearing the following year ; and 
it is a celebrated essay, while the former essay is but little known 
save by the special student of Kant. Yet this former essay is, 
to our thinking, one of the most remarkable works ever writ¬ 
ten ; and, in the revival of interest in political speculation 
which we are now happily witnessing, it is to be hoped that it 
will at last receive that attention among ourselves which it 
deserves. The work is much more than a political essay. It is 
a work which may be compared, among recent works, with 
Fiske’s “ Destiny of Man.” It is a survey of the whole move¬ 
ment of nature and of human history, with a view to determine 
the final end; and its spirit and outcome are singularly like 
those of Mr. Fiske’s treatise, which it preceded by a hundred 
years. It sees clearly that a serious study of evolution tends 
to the teleological principle, a study of the character and 
destiny of man to the idea of God. 

The following are the principal of the nine propositions 
which Kant lays down, and to the unfolding and defence of 
which his essay is devoted: “ All the capacities implanted in 
a creature by nature are destined to unfold themselves, com¬ 
pletely and comformably to their end, in the course of time.” 
“In man, as the only rational creature on earth, those natural 
capacities which are directed toward the use of his reason 
could be completely developed only in the species, and not in 
the individual.” “ The means which nature employs to bring 
about the development of all the capacities implanted in men 
is their mutual antagonism in society, but only so far as this 
antagonism becomes at length the cause of an order among 
them that is regulated by law.” “The greatest practical prob¬ 
lem for the human race, to the solution of which it is com¬ 
pelled by nature, is the establishment of a civil society uni¬ 
versally administering right according to law.” “ The problem 
of the establishment of a perfect civil constitution is dependent 
on the problem of the regulation of the external relations be¬ 
tween the States conformably to law; and without the solution 
of this latter problem it cannot be solved.” “ The history of 
the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the 
realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a politi¬ 
cal constitution internally and, for this purpose, also externally 
perfect, as the only State in which all the capacities implanted 


5 


by her in mankind can be fully developed.” This is a remark¬ 
able body of doctrine. The essay throughout is instinct with 
the principle of progress as the cardinal principle for the inter¬ 
pretation of history, a subject to which Kant a few years after¬ 
ward devoted a special essay. “ The idea of human history,” 
he says, “ viewed as founded upon the assumption of a univer¬ 
sal plan in nature, gives us a new ground of hope, opening up 
to us a consoling view of the future, in which the human race 
appears in the far distance as having worked itself up to a 
condition in which all the germs implanted in it by nature will 
be fully developed and its destiny here on earth fulfilled. Such 
a justification of nature — or rather, let us say, of Providence — 
is no insignificant motive for choosing a particular point of 
view in contemplating the course of the world. For what 
avails it to magnify the glory and wisdom of the creation in 
the irrational domain of nature, and to recommend it to de¬ 
vout contemplation, if that part of the great display of the su¬ 
preme wisdom which presents the end of it all in the history 
of the human race is to be viewed as only furnishing perpetual 
objections to that glory and wisdom ? The spectacle of history, 
if thus viewed, would compel us to turn away our eyes from it 
against our will; and the despair of ever finding a perfect 
rational purpose in its movement would reduce us to hope for 
it, if at all, only in another world.” 

This is precisely in the spirit, we say, of the glowing final 
pages of those most modern books, Mr. Fiske’s “ Destiny of 
Man ” and “ Idea of God.” Kant believes in Providence, in 
God, in nature and in history, in the omnipotence of the right, 
believes that the fact that a thing ought to be is the sure rea¬ 
son that it will be, that “ what is valid on rational grounds as 
a theory is also valid and good for practice,” is the only thing 
that is ultimately good for practice, and is inevitably bound to 
be reduced to practice in due order. 

The consideration of the rational law of progress here stated 
brings Kant, in his essay on “The Principle of Progress,” to 
the idea of internationalism. He shows how the lawlessness 
and caprice of individuals involve evils which alone are suffi¬ 
cient to compel the establishment of the State; “ and in like 
manner,” he says, “ the evils arising from constant wars by 
which the States seek to reduce or subdue each other must 
bring them at last, even against their will, also to enter into a 
universal or cosmopolitical constitution .” This may not, he held, 
assume the form of a universal commonwealth or empire under 
one head, but of “a federation regulated by law according to 
the.rig/it of nations as concerted in common.” In this essay as 


6 


powerfully as in the earlier essay on “The National Principle 
of the Political Order” and in “Eternal Peace ” does he pict¬ 
ure the irrationality and monstrosity of war, and assure himself 
that, just so surely as the world becomes republican, so surely 
will war yield to arbitration and to federation. “ When the 
decision of the question of war falls to the people,”—it is the 
same w r ord as that already quoted from “ Eternal Peace,”— 
“neither will the desire of aggrandizement nor mere verbal 
injuries be likely to induce them to put themselves in danger 
of personal privation and want by inflicting upon themselves 
the calamities of war, which the sovereign in his own person es¬ 
capes. And thus posterity, no longer oppressed by undeserved 
burdens, and owing it not to the direct love of others for them, 
but only to the rational self-love of each age for itself, will be 
able to make progress in moral relations. For each common¬ 
wealth, now become unable to injure any other by violence, 
must maintain itself by right alone; and it may hope on real 
grounds that the others, being constituted like itself, will then 
come, on occasions of need, to its aid.” There is no possible 
remedy, he declares, against the evils of war but “ a system of 
international right founded upon public laws conjoined with 
power, to which every State must submit, according to the 
analogy of the civil or political right of individuals in any one 
State.” To all scepticism about this program and the allega¬ 
tion that it has always been laughed at by statesmen and still 
more by sovereigns, as an idea fit only for the schools from 
which it takes its rise, Kant answers roundly: “ I trust to a 
theory which is based upon the principle of right as determin¬ 
ing what the relation between men and States ought to he, and 
which lays down to these earthly gods the maxim that they 
ought so to proceed in their disputes that such a universal In¬ 
ternational State may be introduced, and to assume it there¬ 
fore as not only possible in practice, but such as may yet be 
presented in reality.” 

Thus everywhere where Kant discusses political relations 
does the great vision of internationalism and of universal peace 
secured by law, just as peace is secured in the State because 
justice is dependent on the court and not the fist, hover before 
him. Leaving the essay on “ Progress,” we must, before re¬ 
turning to “ Eternal Peace,” turn once more to the pages of 
“The National Principle of the Political Order,” for the sake 
of citing a noteworthy passage at which we have already 
hinted, following one of his powerful arraignments of war as 
wasting so ruthlessly the treasures which might be applied to 
the advancement of enlightenment and the highest good of the 


7 


world, as burdening peoples with debts almost impossible to ex¬ 
tinguish, and as settling nothing finally. and reliably, since 
might never makes right and every unjust issue in war is the 
sure seed of future war. So intimate have the political and 
trade relations of nations become, he urges,— and how vastly 
truer has the intervening century made it! — that every political 
disturbance of any State becomes a disturbance of all, which 
are thus more and more forced by the common danger to offer 
themselves as arbiters. “ In doing so/’ says Kant, with mar¬ 
vellous insight and impressiveness, “they are beginning to 
arrange for a great future political body, such as the world has 
never yet seen. Although this political body may as yet exist 
only in a rough outline, nevertheless a feeling begins, as it 
were, to stir in all its members, each of which has a common 
interest in the maintenance of the whole. And this may well 
inspire the hope that, after many political revolutions and 
transformations, the highest purpose of nature will be at last 
realized in the establishment of a universal cosmopolitical 
institution , in the bosom of which all the original capacities 
and endowments of the human race will be unfolded and de¬ 
veloped.” 

Kant’s “ Eternal Peace,” which has a somewhat scholastic 
form, opens with a section containing several preliminary articles 
of peace between States, such as: “ No conclusion of peace 
shall be held to be valid when it has been made with the secret 
reservation of the material for a future war.” “ Standing armies 
shall be entirely abolished .in the course of time.” “No na¬ 
tional debts shall be contracted in connection with the external 
affairs of the States.” “No State shall intermeddle by force 
with the constitution or government of another State.” The 
reasons for these articles, touching the principal causes of war 
in his own time as well as in ours, he elaborates at length. But 
it is in his second section, devoted to the definitive articles of a 
perpetual peace between States, that his three great construc¬ 
tive principles are stated. Those principles are: (i) that the 
civil constitution of every State shall be republican ; (2) that all 
international right must be grounded upon a federation of free 
States ; and (3) that right between nations must be limited to 
the conditions of universal hospitality. The balance of the 
essay is devoted to discussions of the guarantee of perpetual 
peace, the present discordance between morals and politics, 
and the accordance of politics with morals according to the 
transcendental conception of public right. The guarantee of 
perpetual peace is furnished, Kant maintains, “by no less a 
power than the great artist Nature herself ”; and he surveys 


8 


again the course of evolution with all its struggles and antago¬ 
nisms, to show that just as individual men, with all their conflict¬ 
ing interests and inclinations, are forced out of a condition of 
aloofness and lawlessness into the condition of a State, so 
individual nations are being gradually forced toward arbitration 
and federation by the sheer dangers and evils of the present 
disorder, self-interest itself pointing the same way which moralr 
ity commands. To the objection of the practical politician, 
that great reforms theoretically admirable cannot be realized 
because men are what they are, Kant wisely answers that many 
have large knowledge of meti without yet truly knowing the 
nature of man. The process of creation cannot be justified if 
we assume that it never will or can be better with the human 
race. Kant’s cardinal position is that the pure principles of 
right and justice have objective reality, and can be realized in 
fact, that it is precisely our vocation to proceed about their 
realization as fast as we apprehend them, and that failure to 
do this is really opposed to nature and is dangerous politics. 
“ A true political philosophy cannot advance a step without 
first paying homage to the principles of morals. The union of 
politics with morals cuts in two the knots which politics alone 
cannot untie.” When men and States once make up their 
minds to do their clear duty instead of being selfish and spe¬ 
cious, then things which seem hard will rapidly become very 
simple. “ Seek ye first the kingdom of pure practical reason 
and its righteousness is Kant’s exhortation, “ and then will 
your object, the benefit of perpetual^peace, be added unto you.” 

Self-government, a federation of free States, universal hos¬ 
pitality,— these are the features of Kant’s great program. 
“Every form of government which is not representative,” he 
declares, “is a spurious form of government.” “For States 
viewed in relation to each other ” —thus he concludes his dis¬ 
cussion of federation — “ there can be only one way, according 
to reason, of emerging from that lawless condition which con¬ 
tains nothing but occasions of war. Just as, in the case of in¬ 
dividual men, reason would drive them to give up their savage,, 
lawless freedom, to accommodate themselves to public coercive 
laws, and thus to form an ever-growing State of Nations, such 
as would at last embrace all the nations of the earth.” And 
his final words in the section upon universal hospitality are 
these : “ The social relations between the various peoples of 

the world have now advanced everywhere so far that a violation 
of right in one place of the earth is felt all over it. Hence the 
idea of a cosmopolitical right of the whole human race is no 
fantastic or overstrained mode of representing right, but is a 


9 


necessary completion of the unwritten code which carries na¬ 
tional and international right to a consummation in the public 
law of mankind.” 

The English Peace Society published a translation of 
“ Eternal Peace,” by J. D. Morell, a dozen years ago. We 
would suggest to our American Peace Society the circulation of 
an edition of this little book in America at this time, when the 
thought of our people is turned to the subject of international 
arbitration more definitely than ever before. More recently 
the essay has been translated, along with Kant’s other popular 
political essays, by W. Hastie, of Edinburgh, who had previously 
translated Kant’s “ Philosophy of Law,” and published in a 
little volume (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark) entitled “ Kant’s 
Principles of Politics.” * Besides “ Eternal Peace,” “ The 
Principle of the Political Order,” and “ The Principle of Prog¬ 
ress,” already referred to, this volume also contains the essay 
on “Principles of Political Right,” written in 1793, which the 
translator properly characterizes as the philosophical counter¬ 
part and ultimate expression of the American Declaration of 
Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of 
Man. “The one thinker,” says Mr. Hastie, “who .completely 
understood the purpose and end of the whole movement,” — 
of the eighteenth-century revolutions, viewed as the culmination 
of the political science of the centuries,— “ and who was cap¬ 
able of giving it its profoundest and largest expression, was 
Immanuel Kant.” 

It was Kant’s intention to crown his philosophical achieve¬ 
ments by a “ System of Politics,” worked out in accordance 
with the general principles of his philosophy; but he was 
reluctantly compelled in his seventy-seventh year to abandon 
this long-cherished intention. But the political essays which 
he wrote, and which are now placed in the hands of the Eng¬ 
lish reader in such admirable form, indicate sufficiently what 
the lines of his system of politics would have been. It is an 
impressive fact that the interests of social and political recon¬ 
struction were those which in the closing period of his full life 
chiefly engaged the greatest thinker of the modern world. 
For that Immanuel Kant was. The general estimate of his 
place held by philosophic men is, as expressed by Hutchison 
Sterling, “that of the greatest German philosopher, greatest 
modern philosopher, greatest of all philosophers, with the 
usual exceptions of Plato and Aristotle.” He revolutionized 
philosophy. His contributions to physical science were hardly 

* Since the above was written, the American Peace Society have published a translation 
of “ Eternal Peace,” by Dr. Benjamin F. Trueblood. Thismay be procured of the society 
(3 Somerset Street, Boston) for 20 cents per copy or $12 per hundred copies. 


10 


less brilliant and fruitful than his contributions to meta¬ 
physics. He was one of the greatest mathematicians and 
astronomers of all time. To him, and not to Laplace, belongs, 
as is now recognized by all scientific writers on astronomy, the 
merit of the origin of the nebular theory. Mr. Hastie is not 
extravagant in saying that, had he never written anything but 
his “Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens,” 
he would have ranked as the first of the modern evolutionists 
and the founder of scientific cosmology. His work in ethics 
was yet greater and more far-reaching in its results than his 
work in physics. To quote Mr. Hastie again, referring to 
Kant’s later, practical works, “ In all these works he shows 
himself to be the universal philosopher of humanity, the great¬ 
est of the modern moralists, and the initiator of a new era of 
political science.” It is to Kant’s greatness on this side that 
men are now awaking as never before. The philosophers 
have long been shouting, “ Back to Kant! ” This now begins 
to be the cry of the politician and the humanitarian. “ I have 
not yet lost my feeling for humanity,” were the great philoso¬ 
pher’s last words. It was to humanity, to the State, to the 
peace and federation of the world, that his last labors were 
given. “ By inclination,” he once said, “ I am an inquirer. 
I feel all the thirst for knowledge and the eager unrest of 
striving to advance, as well as satisfaction with every kind of 
progress. There was a time when I thought all this could 
form the glory of mankind; and I despised the rabble who 
know nothing. Rousseau brought me to the right view. This 
blinding superiority vanished. I learned to honor men ; and I 
should regard myself as much more useless than the common 
laborers, did I not believe that this way of thinking could com¬ 
municate a value to all others in establishing the rights of 
mankind.” 

It is the logic of events, of history and progress, which has 
now brought the world, or has brought England and America, 
to the necessity and the determination of practically and defi¬ 
nitely establishing the reign of peace and international law. 
But it should be an inspiration and a reassurance to all who 
are working for this high end in the two countries to know 
that this is the logic, the prophecy, and the program of the 
greatest philosopher of modern time. “ England,” says the 
English translator of the political essays of Kant, which it is 
the purpose of these pages to commend to the study of our 
people, “has acted out the principles which Kant has thought 
out and held up for universal imitation and embodiment; and 
this holds even more literally of the New England of America. 


In Kant the student will find the fundamental principles of all 
the best political and social science of the nineteenth century, 
the soundest exposition of constitutional government, and the 
first clear adumbration of the great doctrines of federation 
and universal law, which are now stirring in the s hearts of the 
peoples.” 


Charles Sumner’s More Excel¬ 
lent Way. 

BY EDWIN D. MEAD. 

Charles Sumner began his public life by what he himself 
called a declaration of war against war. His great oration in 
Tremont Temple on “ The True Grandeur of Nations” marked, 
his biographer rightly observes, the most important epoch in 
Sumner’s life. “ Had he died before this event, his memory 
would have been only a tradition with the few early friends who 
survive him. The 4th of July, 1845, gave him a national, and 
more than a national, fame.” Epoch-making in Sumner’s own 
life, we think it may be safely said that no oration which he 
ever gave has greater intrinsic importance, and that no other 
will be read so long. Of all pleas made by American men for 
the rule of peace on earth, it is by far the noblest and most 
comprehensive. There is almost no argument against war 
which it does not somehow make use of; and the advocate of 
peace in all the years returns to it, and returns again, for 
support and inspiration. 

There was nothing upon which Sumner dwelt with greater 
emphasis in this famous oration than upon the cost and waste 
of war and the incalculable advantage that would result from 
the diversion of these misapplied resources to purposes of 
education and the real development and progress of society. 
Passing from the fearful cost of war itself, he discussed the 
regular, permanent expense of the war footing,— the prepara¬ 
tions for war in time of peace. His survey of the armies and 
navies and fortifications of Europe is interesting to-day chiefly 
as revealing how startlingly the burden has increased in the 
fifty years between then and now. In the United States he 
found that the average annual appropriation for military and 
naval purposes was 80 per cent, of the total annual expenses 
of the government. “ Yes, eighty cents in every dollar were 
applied in this unproductive manner. The remaining twenty 
cents sufficed to maintain the government in all its branches, 

Reprinted from the “Editor’s Table” of the New England Magazine, October, 1898. 
This leaflet maybe procured for $1.50 per hundred copies, or #10 per thousand, from the 
Peace Crusade Committee, 1 Beacon Street, Boston. 


executive, legislative and judicial, the administration of 
justice, our relations with foreign nations, the post-office, and 
all the light-houses which, in happy, useful contrast with the 
forts, shed their cheerful signals over the rough waves, beating 
upon our long coast.” In the years from the formation of our 
government, in 1789, down to the time when Sumner spoke, 
almost twelve times as much was sunk under the sanction of 
the national government in mere peaceful preparations for war 
as was dedicated by the government during the same period 
to all other purposes whatever. Of the military expenses of 
the United States from that time to this, all of us know 
something. 

But “the passage which was most striking at the time,” 
says Sumner’s biographer, “ according to the testimony of 
hearers still living, was the one where, treating of the immense 
waste of war defences, he compared the coast of the 1 Ohio,’ 
a ship-of-the-line lying in the harbor and, on account of its 
decorations, a marked spectacle of the day, with that of 
Harvard College.” 

“ Within cannon range of this city,” he said, “ stands an institution of 
learning which was one of the earliest cares of our forefathers, the con¬ 
scientious Puritans. Favored child in an age of trial and struggle, care¬ 
fully nursed through a period of hardship and anxiety, endowed at that 
time by the oblations of men like Harvard, sustained from its first founda¬ 
tion by the parental arm of the commonwealth, by a constant succession 
of munificent bequests, and by the prayers of good men, the University 
at Cambridge now invites our homage, as the most ancient, most interest¬ 
ing, and most important seat of learning in the land.” 

He spoke of its library, the oldest and most valuable in the 
country, its museums, its schools of law, divinity, and medi¬ 
cine, its body of professors and teachers, “many of whose 
names help to keep the name of the country respectable in 
every part of the globe where science, learning, and taste are 
cherished, and its distinguished president, Josiah Quincy, who 
had rendered such high public service in so many fields. 
“ Such,” he said, “is Harvard University; and as one of the 
humblest of her children, happy in the memories of a youth 
nurtured in her classic retreats, I cannot allude to her without 
an expression of filial affection and respect. It appears,” he 
added, “ from the last report of the treasurer, that the whole 
available property of the University, the various accumulations 
of more than two centuries of generosity, amounts”—1845 
was still the day of small things at Harvard — “to $703,175.” 

“Change the scene,” said Sumner, “ and cast your eyes upon another 
object. There now swings idly at her moorings in this harbor a ship of 


3 


the line, the ‘Ohio,’ carrying ninety guns, finished as late as 1836 at an 
expense of $547,888, repaired only two years afterwards for $233,012, with 
an armament which has cost $53,945, making an aggregate of $834,845,” 
—1845 was the day of small things in battle-ships,—“as the actual 

outlay at this moment for that single ship, more than $100,000 beyond all 
the available wealth of the richest and most ancient seat of learning in 
the land!” 

He referred to the “ Ohio ” because that ship happened to 
be in the harbor, not because it afforded the strongest case. 
The expense of the “Delaware,” in 1842, had reached $1,051- 
000. He pursued the comparison further. The expenditures 
of the University during the preceding year had been $47,935. 
The cost of the “Ohio” for one year of service was $220,000. 
“ For the annual sum lavished on a single ship of the line, 
four institutions like Harvard University might be supported.” 
The pay of the captain of a ship like the “ Ohio ” was $4,500: 
the salary of the president of Harvard University was 

$2,235- 

“If the large endowments of Harvard University,” he continued, “are 
dwarfed by comparison with a single ship-of-the-line, how must it be with 
other institutions of learning and beneficence, less favored by the bounty 
of many generations? The average cost of a sloop of war is $315,000,— 
more, probably, than all the endowments of those twin stars of learning 
in the western part of Massachusetts, the colleges at Williamstown and 
Amherst, and of that single star in the east, the seminary at Andover. 
The yearly expense of a sloop of war in service is about $50,000, — mo/re 
than the annual expenditures of these three institutions combined.” 

“Take all the institutions of learning and beneficence,” so Sumner con¬ 
cluded his arraignment, “ the crown jewels of the Commonwealth,— schools, 
colleges, hospitals, asylums,— and the sums by which they have been pur¬ 
chased and preserved are trivial and beggarly compared with the treasures 
squandered within the borders of Massachusetts in vain preparations for 
war,— upon the navy yard at Charlestown, with its stores on hand, costing 
$4,741,000, the fortifications in the harbors of Massachusetts, where untold 
sums are already sunk, and it is now proposed to sink $3,875,000 more, and 
the arsenal at Springfield, containing, in 1842, 175,118 muskets, valued at 
$2,099,998, and maintained by an annual appropriation of $200,000,— whose 
highest value will ever be, in the judgment of all lovers of truth, that it 
inspired a poem which in influence will be mightier than a battle, ancH will 
endure when arsenals and fortifications have crumbled to earth. 

“ ‘ Were half the power that fills the world with terror, 

Were half the w r ealth bestowed on camps and courts, 

Given to redeem the human mind from error, 

There w'ere no need of arsenals or forts.’ ” 

At the Alumni dinner at Harvard in Commencement week, 
last June, the attention of Harvard and of the country was 
recalled to these old utterances of Sumner’s in an emphatic 
and surprising way. Charles Francis Adams, the president of 


4 


the Alumni, who spoke chiefly of the Civil War, observed, in 
introducing President Eliot, after critical words upon the char¬ 
acter and tendencies of the war with Spain, that the cost of the 
war, estimated at $40,000,000 per month, would run three hun¬ 
dred and sixty-five universities of the size of Harvard. Taking 
up this word in opening his speech, President Eliot said: — 

I am not sure I shall be able to follow President Adams in the line he 
has suggested. The quick capital of Harvard University is not more than 
the cost of two battle-ships; but can we compute what those battle-ships 
may win? It was Charles Sumner, w r ho looks down upon us from the 
other side of this hall, who first made comparisons of that nature; and some 
years after he had made them there came upon us the terrific struggle 
which President Adams has been describing so eloquently. About that 
time I came to the conclusion that the whole argument of Charles Sumner 
was a fallacious one. 

President Eliot said other things concerning war and patriot¬ 
ism, in his speech, upon which, were this a more general word 
upon those subjects, we should have something to say. He 
spoke with manifest approval and with warmth of those stu¬ 
dents who upon any call to arms “offered their lives and their 
labor to their country without much thought except for love,— 
just as.a lover throws a rose at the feet of his mistress. The 
educated youth,” he said, “who loves his country, does not 
stop to consider in what precise cause his country has gone to 
war.” We should have something to say concerning these 
utterances because, while all who are familiar with President 
Eliot’s position upon public matters must know well how he 
himself, speaking more leisurely and deliberately, would sup¬ 
plement and qualify them, we consider their primary and natu¬ 
ral significance and influence so vicious (to use the word 
which, instead of fallacious, the newspapers attributed to 
President Eliot in his characterization of Sumner’s argument). 
Their influence seems to us especially dangerous in a time like 
that through w'hich we have been passing. They do not de¬ 
scribe what seems to us the desirable or right state of mind 
for “the educated youth.” It may become the solemn duty of 
the educated youth, as of each common citizen, to serve his 
country, even on the battlefield, in a cause to which he does 
not believe his country has been wisely or rightly committed, 
because far more may depend upon his country’s integrity and 
welfare than upon anything balanced in a special policy. But 
if the educated youth in our universities do not “ stop to con¬ 
sider,” if they do not ask questions, if they are not trained to 
discriminate between causes, the causes in which their country 
goes to war, determining soberly and rationally what cause 


5 


they can support zealously, what reluctantly, and what not at 
all,— if such be the case with our educated youth, what will be 
the case with the unlearned and the untrained, and what must 
be the fate of the republic ? 

No one surely knows better than President Eliot himself the 
difference between causes and between the services which the 
educated youth may be asked to render his government. Of 
the Civil War and the war with Spain he declared distinctly, in 
this same speech, “The two wars, in their origin and motive, 
can hardly be compared ” ; and no one would ever suspect him 
of any general spirit of jingoism or militarism. Two news¬ 
papers lying on our table as we write quote trenchant words 
from him of the sort necessary for these times. The first pas¬ 
sage is from the close of a recent address : — 

After everything possible has been said in favor of martial virtues and 
achievements, whenever our people really take up the question how best to 
win glory, honor, and love for free institutions in general and the American 
Republic in particular, whether in our own eyes or in the eyes of other 
nations and later times, they will come to the conclusion that more glory, 
honor, and love are to be won by national justice, sincerity, patience in 
failure, and generosity in success than by national impatience, combative¬ 
ness, and successful self-seeking, by as much as the virtues and ideals of 
civilized man excel those of barbarous man. 

The second passage is from his address at the Washington 
Conference in 1896 in the interest of a permanent arbitration 
treaty with England. In that address he spoke of the recent 
jingoism in this country as “ a detestable thing,” “ an offensive 
foreign importation,” “ a delusion than which a more complete 
cannot be imagined.” 

“ What other powerful nation,” he asked, “ has dispensed with a standing 
army ? What other nation with an immense seaboard has maintained but 
an insignificant fleet ? It has been our glory to be safe, though without 
fortresses, fleets, or armies.” “ I, too,” he exclaimed, “ believe that this 
nation has a mission in the world, a noble mission; but it is not that of 
armed force. It is not by force of arms that we may best commend to the 
peoples of the earth the blessings of liberty and self-government, but 
rather by taking millions from various peoples into our own land, and 
here giving them experience of the advantages of freedom. . . . There is 
only one other means by which we should teach these principles to men. 
It is by example,— by giving a persuasive example, of happiness and pros¬ 
perity, arrived at through living in freedom and at peace. Never should 
we advocate the extension of our institutions by force of arms, either on 
sea or land.” 

We believe, says the writer who recalls this Washington ad¬ 
dress of President Eliot’s, that Sumner would have called it a 
consummate practical statement of his argument, and would 


6 


have recognized his own voice in the noble passage quoted. 
“ We appeal from President Eliot, the Alumni dinner orator in 
time of the excitement and delirium of war, to President Eliot 
in time of peace and sobriety.” 

With President Eliot, therefore, we should be slow to believe 
that we have any long or fundamental controversy. But with 
his word at Harvard in June, with any reflection upon Sum¬ 
ner’s argument in “The True Grandeur of Nations,” we do 
have controversy. We can think of nothing more dangerous 
or deplorable, especially at this time in America, than encour¬ 
agement to our educated youth to view that great argument and 
vision as vicious or fallacious. We believe that in the line of 
Sumner’s thought lies the hope of the world; and we believe 
that those who think as Sumner thought, should, without 
recourse to any generalities, to anything remote in time or 
place, apply that principle firmly and sweepingly to the situa¬ 
tion through which the republic has been passing and the 
situation which confronts us to-day. 

We have spent $300,000,000 in a war with Spain. We are 
in the outer circles of the maelstrom of a policy which means 
larger armies, larger navies, costlier forts, and more of them, 
and all the paraphernalia of the Old World militarism which 
we have prided ourselves on being free from,— with the corre¬ 
sponding burdens of taxation, the devotion to waste and de¬ 
struction of the immense resources which might otherwise go 
to development and progress. The man who does not see 
that we are in the outer circles of this maelstrom is a fool; 
and the man who, seeing it, has no forebodings, is not a stu¬ 
dent of history. Is this way of spending money, which is now 
proposed to the republic,— to put Sumner’s question directly 
to ourselves,— a wise way? Is it protective, is it constructive, 
is it good business, is it common sense, does it pave a good 
road into the future, is it the economical and promising way 
to secure the results we claim to aim at, will it make us a 
truer and safer democracy, and will it help the world ? Was 
Sumner right, was Longfellow right, or was he not, in claiming 
that, if half the wealth bestowed on camps, given to maintain 
armies and navies, were given to redeem the human mind, to 
educate the human race, there would soon be no need of 
armies and navies? 

We have spent $300,000,000 in a war with Spain. Have 
we spent it well ? Have we done the most that could be done 
with $300,000,000 to accomplish what we claimed to want to 
accomplish ? Our object in going to war with Spain was to 
make Cuba free, to make it a better place to live in, to insure 


7 


it better government, and make its people comfortable and 
happy. Have we done it? Have we got our money’s worth? 
Has our way of spending our $300,000,000 been best, or 
would Sumner’s way have been best ? If in the midst of last 
April’s perplexities the senator who sits in Sumner’s seat had 
addressed words like the following to the senate and the 
nation, would they have been vicious or fallacious words ? 


We are clearly drifting towards a war with Spain in behalf of Cuba. 
In a month, unless we show wisdom greater than the past has shown, we 
shall be in the midst of war. That war will cost us $300,000,000. Is 
there not a better way of spending $300,000,000 ? Is there not a better 
way of achieving'what we aim at,— the freedom, good government, and 
development of Cuba? I propose that we submit to Cuba and to Spain 
this offer and request: Let us establish at Havana a university as well 
equipped as Harvard University, with an endowment of $10,000,000, free 
to every young man and woman of Cuba, with the best professors who 
can be secured from America and Spain and England and France and 
Germany. Let us establish at Santiago and Matanzas and Puerto Principe 
colleges like Amherst and Williams, with a total endowment of $10,000,- 
000; and in each of the twenty largest towns a high school or academy, 
at a cost of $10,000,000. Let us devote $20,000,000 — $1,000,000 a year 
for twenty years — to the thorough planting *in Cuba of our American 
common-school system; $10,000,000 to the promotion of a system of free 
public libraries, making books as accessible and common in each Cuban 
town and village as in Barnstable or Berkshire; and $6,000,000 for the 
maintenance in each of the six provinces of a newspaper conducted by 
the best men who can be enlisted in the service, bringing all Cuban men 
and women into touch with all the world, giving them those things which 
will feed them, and not giving them those things which would poison them. 
Let us build a Cuban Central Railroad through the whole length of the 
island, from Mantua to Maysi; and let us devote the balance of $100,000,- 
000 to the scientific organization, by proper bureaus, of Cuban agriculture, 
industry, and commerce. Let there be a truce for ten years, till these 
things are done and begin to show their fruits; and then let the represen¬ 
tatives of the United States and Spain meet at Havana to settle the 
4t Cuban question” as it then exists. This, fellow-citizens of America, 
seems to me worth trying. If it succeeds, we should at least have saved 
$200,000,000; and it would be, I think, a kind of success more pregnant 
with good for Cuba and Spain and America and humanity than the suc¬ 
cess which we may be celebrating next September. I spent the still hours 
of last night, leaving all this hurly-burly, reading Charles Sumner’s solemn 
words on “The True Grandeur of Nations”; and his message has com¬ 
manded me to submit this proposition to you at this hour. There are 
those of you who will laugh and scoff, and say the thought is all chimeri¬ 
cal, vicious, and fallacious; but I say unto you, in the name of the God 
of our fathers, that with those of you who do not think so lies the hope 
of the world. I say that the kingdom of God can come in this world, 
that peace and justice and fraternity can come among men, that democracy 
itself has a safe future, only as some elect people, with sublime abandon, 
in a great opportunity, does this thing, — taking, in this world of undenia¬ 
ble and conflicting risks, the heroic risk, — the risk which alone has in it 
hope for the world and relish of salvation. A ud our opportunity is now. 


8 


We wish that these considerations might sink deeply into 
the heart of every member of Harvard University and into the 
hearts of all the educated youth of America. If our republic 
is to be true to itself, if we are to help civilization forward and 
not backward, then the young men of our universities and all 
of us who look at war and national defence and national 
grandeur in the old way have got to be born again,— nothing 
less than that,— baptized with the spirit wherewith Charles 
Sumner was baptized, and have our eyes opened to see that 
his way is the only right or sensible or efficient way, and that 
now we are wasting our substance and defeating ourselves. 
The revolution in the point of view is as radical as the differ¬ 
ence between Ptolemy and Copernicus; but, when we go 
through it, things fall at once into order, we find ourselves in 
a rational world with right means for right ends, and our old 
notions of what is wise and prudent and necessary for the 
defence and upbuilding and influence of the nation instantly 
dissolve, stamped all as vicious and fallacious. Our thoughts 
on what it is that makes a nation strong need almost all of 
them to be turned inside out. Our economics and generosities 
are all Ptolemaic. We boast of public and private munifi¬ 
cences in education and philanthropy. We need to under¬ 
stand that we are yet in the kindergarten of munificence as 
concerns all positive, constructive, and real things. It would 
sometimes seem as if, were the devil privileged to organize 
the world so as to thwart struggling men most effectually, 
wasting their accumulations and cutting forever the margin of 
civilization, he would choose precisely what he now sees,— the 
dominance of false political ideals and of gross unintelligence 
as to how men and nations should spend their money. If an 
eleventh commandment were to be added to the decalogue, it 
should be one addressed to nations, and should be : Thou 
shalt not waste thy substance. Last spring, as the war with 
Spain began,— a war whose aim and motive we justified and 
praised, although we held with the President and the Secretary 
of State and the minister to Spain that it was wholly unneces¬ 
sary for the attainment of its aim,— we wrote in these pages 
the following words: as the war ends, we repeat them, as an¬ 
other statement for this time of Sumner’s argument, the eco¬ 
nomic argument, which our educated youth and all of us who 
wish to see the world get on need to ponder upon in a far 
severer and more serious way than most of us are wont to do: 

Every war gives new life to that old notion which died so hard, but 
which is responsible for so much mischief in the world, that patriotism is 


9 


somehow bound up with war,— the patriotic man, the man who fights or 
wants to fight for his country. Congress, “in a great wave of patriotism,” 
we read, appropriates fifty million dollars for gun-boats and torpedoes. No 
“wave of patriotism” is reported when Massachusetts appropriates a mill¬ 
ion dollars for good roads, when New York appropriates five millions for 
new school-houses or Chicago ten millions for an exposition, when Boston 
builds a library, when the Adirondack forests are secured, when the college 
is endowed, and when good wages are paid in the factory. There may be 
exigencies when the appropriation of fifty million dollars or five hundred 
millions for national defence or for national offence is the duty imposed 
upon the patriot; but the man who votes for guns and gun-boats with a 
glow and an excitement which he does not feel when he has opportunity to 
help on the great interests of education, science, art, and industry, may be 
very sure that his glow is not the honest glow of patriotism, but is very 
likely the excitement of the tiger and the savage, which still lives on in 
good society and dies so hard in half-civilized and even civilized men. It 
happens every day that a council, a legislature, or a congress, will buoy¬ 
antly— without computation, without protest, and without debate — vote 
the people’s thousands or millions of money for some great waste, some 
great destruction — new cruisers and new forts — when some poor pittance 
is grudgingly doled out or grudgingly denied—each dollar pinched and 
challenged — for the measure of philanthropy, of conservation, of construc¬ 
tion, of education, of relief, of encouragement or high emprise, whose 
generous and bold advancement would do so much to hasten the day when 
forts and cruisers shall be unnecessary and obsolete. Society is zealous 
and lavish on its displays and its defences,— its dams and sewers and 
police and armament, — and blind and niggardly a thousand times as to the 
things which affect its fountains and its real vitality, the interests of the 
discipline and the construction which make protection needless. 

The lifelong position of Charles Sumner upon the subject 
of armies and navies and forts and wars is to be commended 
to the educated youth of America at this time as a position 
peculiarly worthy of their adoption, imperatively worthy of 
their earnest thought. Sumner was not a non-resistant, not 
a man of “ peace at any price.” We know how warmly and 
efficiently, in his place in the Senate, he supported the govern¬ 
ment in the Civil War; and we know how otherwise he ap¬ 
pealed to force when that appeal was necessary and just. We 
know how he believed in strong government and hated imbecile 
police, how he spoke of “the sword of the magistrate” in 
the very record of his services for peace. But the great prin¬ 
ciples of his “True Grandeur of Nations” were the principles 
of his whole life, from a time long before that oration to the 
last hour, when he bequeathed a thousand dollars to Harvard 
University for an annual prize for the best essay on Universal 
Peace. We do not remember any autobiographical passage 
in his writings so impressive as that in which, replying to 
unfriendly criticism, he gives an account of his devotion to 
the peace movement. We do not remember any passage any¬ 
where which we would commend so earnestly at this time to 


IO 


the students of Harvard University as one worth striving to be 
able to parallel in their own autobiographies. 

“My name,” he wrote, “is connected somewhat with two questions, 
which may be described succinctly as those of peace and slavery. That 
which earliest enlisted me, and which has always occupied much of my 
thoughts, is the peace question. When scarcely nine years old, it was my 
fortune to listen to President Quincy’s address before the Peace Society, 
delivered in the Old South Church. It made a deep and lasting impression 
on my mind; and though, as a boy and youth, I surrendered myself to the 
illusions of battles and wars, still, as I came to maturity, I felt too keenly 
their wickedness and woe. A lecture which I heard from William Ladd, 
in the old court-house at Cambridge, shortly after I left college,'confirmed 
these impressions.” He tells how he expressed his ripened convictions to 
his friends, and how, going to Europe, he often dwelt upon them there. 
In Paris, when M. Victor Foucher submitted for his criticism the manu¬ 
script of his treatise upon the law of nations, Sumner, observing that he 
had adopted, among his fundamental principles, that war was recognized 
as the necessary arbitrament between nations, ventured to discuss this 
dogma, and, while admitting that it was accepted by every publicist up to 
that time, suggested to him to be the first to brand it as unchristian and 
barbarous and to declare that the institution of war, defined and sanctioned 
by the law of nations as a mode of determining justice between them, was 
but another form of the ordeal by battle, which was once regarded as a 
proper mode of determining justice between individuals. Returning to 
Boston after his two years and a half in Europe, he tells of the little meet¬ 
ing of the American Peace Society to which he found his way in the very 
month of his arrival. “The Rev. Henry Ware was in the chair. I think 
there were not more than twelve persons present. We met in a small 
room under the Marlboro Chapel. On motion of Doctor Gannett, I was 
placed on the executive committee.” He tells of his humble efforts for the 
cause in the next few years; and then he comes to the oration on the 4th 
of July, 1845. “The position taken by me on this occasion has drawn 
upon me not a little criticism,— perhaps I might use a stronger expression. 
Convinced of its intrinsic propriety and importance, I have been drawn, on 
subsequent occasions, by an inevitable necessity, to sustain and fortify it. 
I hope that I shall always be willing to maintain it.” 

Universal peace, the methods by which war may be perma¬ 
nently superseded,— these were ever the burden of his thought 
and study, of addresses to the public and letters to friends; 
and ever the economic argument is at the front. “ I wish our 
country would cease to whet its tusks,” he writes to Doctor 
Howe in 1843. “The appropriations of the navy last year 
were nine million dollars. Imagine half — nay, a tithe —of 
this sum given annually to objects of humanity, education and 
literature ! I know of nothing in our government that troubles 
me more than this thought.” To his brother George in 1844: 
“I would not vote a dollar for any engine of war. One war- 
steamer costs more than all the endowments of Harvard 
College. Nations keep standing armies and Paixhan guns — 
sharpen their tusks — that they may be prepared for war. 


II 


Far better to be always prepared for peace.” Again: “What 
a boon to France, if her half million of soldiery were devoted 
to the building of railways and other internal improvements, 
instead of passing the day in carrying superfluous muskets! 
What a boon to Paris, if the immense sums absorbed in her 
fortifications were devoted to institutions of benevolence! 
She has more to fear from the poverty and wretchedness of her 
people than from any foreign foe.” No crime was to him so 
great as that of the country which “ entered into war for the 
sordid purpose of securing a few more acres of land.” No 
letter that came to him among the many drawn out by “ The 
True Grandeur of Nations ” was more welcome than that from 
Theodore Parker,— his first letter to Sumner, the beginning of 
their friendship,— defending him from the attacks of “men oi 
low morals, who can only swear by their party and live only in 
public opinion,” and exclaiming : “ The Church and State are 
both ready to engage in war, however unjust, if a little territory 
can be added to the national domain thereby. The great 
maxims of Christianity—the very words of Christ — are 
almost wholly forgotten.” Full of faith in the republic, con¬ 
fident in the influence its institutions were destined to exert 
over the ancient establishments of Europe, he prayed “that a 
race of men may be reared among us competent to understand 
the destinies of the country, to abjure war, and to give extension 
and influence to our institutions by cultivating the arts of 
peace, by honesty, and by dignity of life and character.” In 
the cause of peace lay to him the hope of the world. “It is 
destined,” he said, “to a triumph much earlier than many 
imagine. It is so necessary to meet the financial embarrass¬ 
ments of Europe and the humane aspirations of the age that 
it must succeed. Let it be presented carefully and clearly, let 
the incalculable good it has in store be unfolded, and people 
must feel its practicability. ... I have full faith in a coming era 
of humanity; but I believe it is to be brought about by remov¬ 
ing existing evils, by education, and especially by removing the 
great evil and expense of war preparations or the war system. 
If the friends of progress in Europe would aim at the armies 
and navies, direct all their energies at these monster evils, all 
else that can reasonably be desired will soon follow. Why not 
sound the idea in the ears of Europe ? ” It was to his brother, 
then in Europe, that he wrote, in 1849. His call has been 
heard, fifty years afterward, by the Czar of Russia. 

In 1849, four years after the oration on “The True Grandeur 
of Nations,” he delivered an address on “The Abolition of the 
War System in the Commonwealth of Nations,” advocating 


12 


instead of the arbitrament of arms a Congress of Nations with 
a high court of judicature or arbitration; and the next year, as 
chairman of the Peace Congress for this country, he prepared 
an address to the people of the United States, recommending 
these methods. In 1870 he was still enforcing the truths which 
he enforced in 1845. He gave in many places, in the autumn 
of that year, a lecture on the war between France and Prussia, 
pointing as its moral that the war system should be discarded 
and the nations should disarm themselves. In 1873 he was 
invited to be one of the speakers at the public meeting held at 
Steinway Hall, New York, to stimulate a war spirit against 
Spain at the time of the seizure of the “ Virginius,”—a meet¬ 
ing at which Mr. Evarts presided, and made an inflammatory 
speech; but he declined, and instead sent a letter of a spirit 
directly opposite to that of the meeting, in which he insisted 
on waiting for evidence and on considerate treatment of the 
Spanish republic, and discountenanced the belligerent prepa¬ 
rations then under way in our navy yards, which involved bur¬ 
densome expenditure and encouraged an unhealthy war fever. 
In 1873, also, in the last summer of his life, he sent a letter of 
congratulation to Henry Richards, who had succeeded in car¬ 
rying through the House of Commons a motion in favor of 
international arbitration. “ It marks an epoch in a great 
cause. There is no question so supremely practical; for it 
concerns not merely one nation, but every nation, and even its 
discussion promises to diminish the terrible chances of war. 
Its triumph would be the greatest reform of history.” At the 
same time he wrote to his English friend, Robert Ingham : — 

I have been cheered by the vote of the House of Commons on Mr. 
Richard’s motion. ... It cannot fail to exert a prodigious influence. I 
know no reform which promises such universal good as the release of any 
considerable portion of present war expenditures or expenditure on arma¬ 
ments, so that they can be applied to purposes of civilization. It is absurd 
to call this Utopian. . . . Here is an open and incessant waste. Why not 
stop it ? Here is something which keeps human thoughts on bloodshed, 
and rears men to slay each other. Why not turn their thoughts to things 
which contribute to human happiness ? Mr. Richard has done a great 
work, and so has the House of Cgmmons. . . . Such a presentation of 
the case must have an effect on the continent as well as in England, teach¬ 
ing reason. I shall not live to see the great cause triumph. I often wish 
I had been born a few years later, and one reason is because I long to wit¬ 
ness the harmony of nations, which I am sure is near. When an evil so 
great is recognized and discussed, the remedy must be at hand. 

But it was to Harvard University that Charles Sumner ad¬ 
dressed his first striking message and his last, in behalf of the 
rule of peace. The first message was through Henry Ware. 
Mr. Ware, a graduate of Harvard of the Class of 1843, writes : 


13 


I went with Professor Felton one day, just after our Commencement 
parts had been assigned, into Sumner’s office; and he, kindly asking what 
I had got, and being told that I had to do a Latin oration, asked me what 
subject I had chosen. I replied that I had not yet found a text to my 
mind. “Then,” said he, “I will give you one,— De imperio pads: talk 
about that.” And, says Mr. Ware, I did. 

His last message was through his will, the most memorable 
provision of which was as follows : — 

I bequeath to the President and Fellows of Harvard College one thou¬ 
sand dollars' in trust, for an annual prize for the best dissertation by any 
student of the College, or any of its schools, undergraduate or graduate, on 
Universal Peace and the methods by which war may be permanently super¬ 
seded. I do this in the hope of drawing the attention of students to the 
practicability of organizing peace among nations, which I sincerely believe 
may be done. I cannot doubt that the same modes of decision which now 
prevail between individuals, between towns, and between smaller communi¬ 
ties, mdjy be extended to nations. 

We cannot doubt that more and more, as days go on, the 
attention of the students of Harvard University will be drawn 
to Sumner’s last solemn call and charge,— that this “most 
ancient, most interesting, and most important seat of learning 
in the land,” to which in the sweep of his great oration he 
could not allude without pausing to pay his tribute of filial 
affection, will more and more become a centre where educated 
and aspiring youth, with their hearts kindled by Sumner’s gos¬ 
pel and with great visions of a better future, will provoke each 
other to high argument, and in times of war prepare for peace. 
Upon each student’s desk shall lie, as a book of each student’s 
Bible, the great oration of the greatest son of Harvard who in 
the memory of men now living has gone forth from Harvard’s 
halls into the councils of the nation. And no page of it will 
be pondered more than that which sets forth how, if we would 
transfer to the offices of education and development the mill¬ 
ions now appropriated so lavishly for destruction and defence, 
the need of destruction and defence would quickly cease. 

With two causes the name of the great Harvard senator 
is identified,— the cause of freedom and the cause of peace. 
From the wall of the memorial hall which Harvard built 
to commemorate the services of her sons in the cause of 
freedom, Sumner’s face looks down upon the hundreds of 
students gathering daily in that most holy place, and upon 
the hundreds of alumni who, “ in the memories of a youth 
nurtured in her classic retreats,” come up to the ancient Uni¬ 
versity as each Commencement week comes round. As that 
face looks down on them in the years to come, may it not 


14 


speak chiefly to them of the past, of the victory of the cause 
of freedom, whose fruits we enjoy to-day, but of the future, the 
triumph, which he so longed to live to see and which the edu¬ 
cated youth of American can do so much to hasten, of the 
cause of universal peace. Ever and ever may Harvard con¬ 
sider wherein the true grandeur of nations lies, and ever and 
ever hear the first and last message of her great statesman 
giving a new burden and new power to her great singer’s gos¬ 
pel: — 

“ Were half the power that fills the world with terror, 

Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, 

Given to redeem the human mind from error, 

There were no need of arsenals or forts.” 













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